Past Events, 2003-2015
The Spies and Stranglers Yuletide Special
Featuring authors Cathi Unsworth and Paul Willetts, with readings by Jon Glover and Callum Coates
14 December 2015
Part One
Cathi Unsworth will introduce her latest novel, Without The Moon, which draws for its inspiration on a real case. It’s London 1942 and Detective Ted Greenaway is not happy to be working as a murder detective. With his younger colleagues volunteering to serve their country, Greenaway has no choice but to accept his new position. Just as well: for in February 1942 a serial killer emerges into the London night, stalking victims amongst the working girls in the West End and Paddington.
His murderous mutilations are enough to shock Greenaway and his most hard-bitten colleagues and the speed at which he cuts his swathe through the city is unprecedented. But Greenaway’s strength is that he can always draw upon unorthodox allies. Information comes his way from veteran Fleet Street journalist Hannen Swaffer, whose penchant for spiritualism and showbiz has gained him a loyal audience amongst the superstitious London brasses. If their stories are true, then the man Greenaway seeks is a member of the British armed forces.
Greenaway’s chase for the sex maniac killer plays out in an after hours world of seance circles, salons and speakeasies, where wide boys and working girls, spooks and mediums, communists and journalists find common ground in a blacked out, bomb-ravaged city….
Part Two
Paul Willetts will talk about his new book Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms. This provides the first comprehensive account of what was once hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II.
This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising twenty-eight year-old Ivy League graduate, who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent. Against the backdrop of London high society during the so-called Phoney War, Kent’s life intersects with the lives of the book’s two other memorably flamboyant protagonists. One of those is Maxwell Knight, an urbane, endearingly eccentric MI5 spyhunter. The other is Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian fashion designer and Nazi spy whose outfits are worn by the Duchess of Windsor and whose parents are friends of the British royal family.
Bongo the Bomb! Beatnik Christmas Party, 1959-style
At the Harrison Hotel, 28 Harrison Street, King’s Cross
4 December 2015
7.30pm: The Brian and Mick Denny Duo treating us to a veritable orgy of period folk.
8.15pm: The Travis Elborough Beat Club, our in-house “disc jockey”, will play an assortment of hot waxings
8.35pm: Lionel Breechwater, the Beat Bard of Wood Green.
8.40pm: Moody Benedict Newbery, (The Sohemian Poet Laurette) will be just Larkin about (geddit, Dad?)
8.50pm: Donnie Lonegan and his Ding Dong Rhythm Club
9.10pm: Mr Cholmondley-Warner, Nuclear Bomb Public Information Alert
9.15pm: The Travis Elborough Beat Club
9.30pm: Special Guest Appearance: Jean-Paul Sartre, Absolutely Live
9.35: The Incredible Earl Okin and his Orchestra
10.15pm: The Travis Elborough Beat Club…
Photo of Mr Cholmondley-Warner aka Jon Glover © Travis Elborough
Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess
A talk by Andrew Lownie
25 November 2015
Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of ”The Cambridge Spies”—Maclean, Philby, Blunt—all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.
In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess’s chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.
Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin’s Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder.
In Search of the Third Man
A talk by Charles Drazin
21 October 2015
Sixty-six years after its release in 1949 The Third Man remains unsurpassed as a masterpiece of British cinema. Whether it is Harry Lime’s magical first appearance, or the celebrated cuckoo clock speech, or the climactic chase through the sewers beneath Vienna, or the haunting theme music of Anton Karas, the film contains some of the most memorable moments in movie history.
Bringing together such strong and disparate personalities as Graham Greene, Carol Reed, Orson Welles, David Selznick and Sir Alexander Korda, the film was an example of a group endeavour that depended as much on chance as design. At times the planning and making seemed more like a battle than a collaboration. And although the circumstances of its making were dramatic and eventful, until now that story has never been fully told. Drawing on both contemporary documents and accounts of the people involved, Charles Drazin will explore the many myths that over the years have grown around this extraordinary piece of cinema, and seeks to unravel the facts from the fiction.
This is the story not only of a film, but of a pivotal moment in twentieth-century history. Capturing with documentary precision the look and feel of a war-torn Vienna, The Third Man mirrored all the uncertainties and confusions of its time and anticipated the mood of the post-war age.
His Own Executioner: the Life of Nigel Balchin
Derek Collett in conversation with Marc Glendening, plus readings by Jon Glover
23 September 2015
Derek Collett talks about his new book His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin. Derek’s biography is the first to be devoted to this famous British novelist of the 1940s and 1950s, author of great novels such as The Small Back Room (which was made into a film starring Michael Redgrave) and Darkness Falls From The Air. Balchin was a man who was also largely responsible for the success of Black Magic chocolates.
Come along and discover the answers to questions such as why is Balchin important as a novelist, why is he nowhere near as well known today as he deserves to be and why was his second novel deemed to be so salacious that it was banned by Boots Library for fear of offending its core constituency of “repressed spinsters”? The interview will be punctuated with a series of readings from Balchin’s novels by actor Jon Glover.
Patrick Hamilton Night
A talk by Nigel Jones, plus a one-man show by Mark Farrelly
24 June 2015
Part One
Nigel Jones, author of the biography of Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly, will give us an introduction to the great man’s life and works
Part Two
Mark Farrelly will perform his much acclaimed one-man show about Hamilton, The Silence of Snow.
Patrick Hamilton was one of the most celebrated English novelists and playwrights of the 1930s (Rope, Gaslight, Hangover Square). His witty, bleak, drink-sodden writing brilliantly penetrates the dark core of the human psyche.
London Books Evening
20 May 2015
Part One: It Always Rains on Sunday, introduced by Cathi Unsworth
Set over a single day in 1939, Arthur La Bern’s It Always Rains On Sunday captures the East End of London shortly before the start of the Second World War. The book is centred around the residents of Coronet Grove, its focus the Sandigate family. People go about their lives, heading to the local church and pub, while those looking for excitement are drawn to the bright lights of Whitechapel. Rose—a former barmaid in The Two Compasses—is married to George Sandigate, twenty years her senior, the thrill of her time with villain Tommy Swann firmly in the past. Church bells ring as small-time crooks plot in the pub, a newspaper headline telling Rose that Swann has escaped from Dartmoor.
It Always Rains On Sunday is the atmospheric debut novel of Arthur La Bern and features a large, colourful cast of characters. Dreams and reality clash as arguments rage, gangsters lurk, madness simmers, violence is threatened. Sex and death hang heavy in the air. Described as a precursor to Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, the film adaptation was a great success and It Always Rains On Sunday remains a classic of British cinema. The book and its author were likewise lauded, and La Bern would go on to write a series of largely London-based, working-class gems.
Part Two: May Day by John Sommerfield, introduced by Brian Denny
The country is in turmoil—the people are angry at the excesses and corruption of the ruling class; workers are told to increase production for less pay; bosses meet to discuss ways of increasing their profit margins; unions mobilise the masses; a march takes place; police clash with demonstrators and a man is killed on the streets of London. This could well be a snapshot of Britain in the twenty-first century, but it is also an outline of some of the events driving May Day, a novel first published in 1936.
Taking place over a three-day period leading up to and including the worker’s holiday of 1st May, sometime during the 1930s, on one level May Day is a political novel, but more than that it is a book about people. The political is made very personal as an unusually large number of characters fill the pages, some returning again and again, others glimpsed only once, but each appearance moves the book forward as individual stories link and build layers, ultimately creating a unique sort of narrative. There is no main character in May Day, no single voice dominating the book, and this unusual and highly-experimental approach could easily have failed, yet author John Sommerfield pulls it off. May Day is a fluent and exciting read.
Both May Day and It Always Rains on Sunday have been recently republished by the excellent London Books, a publishing house dedicated to making available once again classic works about the capital by great writers.
The Story of BBC Light Entertainment
John Lloyd in conversation with Edward Taylor, plus performances by Jon Glover, Sally Grace, Callum Coates, and James Hurn
May 2015
A panel discussion between John Lloyd (producer of Spitting Image, Blackadder, and QI) and veteran BBC producer Edward Taylor (best-known for The Men From The Ministry). Followed by dramatised live excerpts from Hancock, I’m Sorry, Take It From Here, and Round The Horne, performed by Jon Glover, Sally Grace, Callum Coates, and James Hurn. Tessa La Bars, agent to the scriptwriters Galton and Simpson, will be in the audience.
A Vintage Journey: Teds, Mods, Chapists
A talk by David Saxby, accompanied by examples of vintage garments.
29 April 2015
David Saxby is one of Britain’s last clothing manufacturers and was a founder of the Chap Magazine that has brought joy, poise and sartorial elegance to tens of thousands. It has helped to properly (and appropriately) reclaim the concept of grooming for the nation. He has performed this talk at the V&A.
Mr Saxby will confide in us his journey from being a tailor at a gentlemen’s outfitters in Yorkshire, to his brush with the Teddy Boys, Mods in swinging London in the 1960s to his full blown engagement with the Chapist Movement. He runs a number of vintage clothing emporia across the nation, including Old Hat in Fulham High Street. Among his specialities are sporting tweeds and Inverness capes.
Saxby will explore the reason for the vintage revival and ask, and answer, the existentialist question: what makes an item of clothing “vintage”? He will also perform some songs relating to his talk. Items of actual vintage wear will be produced at this extraordinary event to the amazement of the audience.
Photo credit: Robert Sheie
Tiger Woman: The Betty May Story
A talk and songs by Celine Hispiche
15 April 2015
Dancer, singer. gang member. cocaine addict, Betty May thrilled and appalled the public with her autobiography, Tiger Woman, when it first appeared at the end of the 1920s.
Born into abject squalor in London’s Limehouse area, May used her steely-eyed striking looks and street nous to become an unlikely bohemian celebrity sensation, a fixture at the Café Royal, marrying four times along the way alongside numerous affairs.
Her most fateful adversary was Aleister Crowley, who intended her to be a sacrificial victim of his Thelemite cult in Sicily. Her vitality and ferocious charisma enchanted many artistic figures of the age, including Jacob Epstein and Jacob Kramer.
In addition to telling us about Betty May’s extraordinary life, Celine Hispiche will be singing some songs from her forthcoming musical about Betty May.
The Dilly: A Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys
A talk by Jeremy Reed
18 March 2015
The Dilly is the first comprehensive examination of male prostitution at London’s Piccadilly Circus from the nineteenth century to the present day. On the fringes of Soho, Piccadilly has long been London’s principal location for the illicit sale of sex, and Jeremy Reed explores the history of rent boys from Oscar Wilde’s notorious attraction to the place to the painter Francis Bacon’s predilection for rough trade. The book includes tales of Soho’s clandestine gay clubs from the days when homosexuality was illegal, the punters inexorably drawn to the area, the development of the secret slang known as “Polari” or “Palare”, as well as the Dilly’s influence on pop stars from the Rolling Stones to Morrissey. The author examines the careers of a number of former male prostitutes who worked the infamous “Meat Rack” and investigates what drew them to risk their lives. His study includes a chapter recording his friendship with Francis Bacon and concludes with an account of the demise of the Dilly trade, when male escorts booked online supplanted the boys hanging out on the neon-lit railings.
C.R.W. Nevinson: A Printmaker in War & Peace
A talk by Dr Jonathan Black
18 February 2015
The author and compiler of the recently published book CRW Nevinson: The Complete Prints, Jonathan Black, will give an illustrated talk about this prolific and hugely vibrant Futurist artist. Nevinson produced some of the most poignant images of war in printmaking history. These include “Returning to the Trenches”, “Troops Resting”, “That Cursed Wood” and a set of six lithographs commissioned by the Ministry of Information, titled “Britain’s Efforts and Ideals”.
Murder Monday Christmas Special
Cathi Unsworth talking about George Orwell’s essay, “The Perfect English Murder” , followed by a performance of Marc Glendening's short play, Tea With A Drop of Acid
1 December 2014
We’re going “in-house” as noir novelist Cathi Unsworth revisits Orwell’s take on “The Perfect English Murder” and talks about the real-life cases that have influenced her wonderfully spooky, period-atmospheric thrillers, The Not Knowing, The Singer, Bad Penny Blues, Weirdo and the forthcoming Without the Moon, a Second World War-set chiller that draws upon the “Blackout Strangler”.
Then after a short interval during which mince pies (possibly containing suspiciously sour-tasting substances) will be served, Miss Emma Bown, Mr Callum Coates and Mr Duncan Bolt, in 1940s period dress, with live musical accompaniment from Madame Sophie Loyer, will perform Tea with a Drop of Acid, written by Marc Glendening, co-founder of the Sohemian Society. This will mark the West End debut of this work, following its performance at the Southend Dragnet Festival.
Be afraid, very afraid…
Video of Marc Glendening's short play, Tea with a Drop of Acid, recorded by Fenris Oswin.
Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War
A talk by Jerry White
22 October 2014
1pm, Tuesday 4 August 1914: with the declaration of war London becomes one of the greatest killing machines in human history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through the capital on their way to the front; wounded men are brought back to be treated in London’s hospitals; and millions of shells are produced in its factories.
The war changes London life for ever. Women escape the drudgery of domestic service to work as munitionettes. Full employment puts money into the pockets of the London poor for the first time. Self-appointed moral guardians seize the chance to clamp down on drink, frivolous entertainment and licentious behaviour. As the war drags on, gloom often descends on the capital. And at night London is plunged into darkness for fear of German bombers and Zeppelins that continue to raid the city.
Yet despite daily casualty lists, food shortages and enemy bombing, Londoners are determined to get on with their lives and flock to cinemas and theatres, dance halls and shebeens, firmly resolved not to let Germans or puritans spoil their enjoyment.
Peopled with patriots and pacifists, clergymen and thieves, bluestockings and prostitutes, Jerry White’s magnificent panorama reveals a struggling yet flourishing city.
This Boy
A talk by Alan Johnson
6 October 2014
Former cabinet minister Alan Johnson will talk about his Orwell Prize-winning memoirs about growing up in extreme poverty in post-war Notting Hill. In addition to his family and school life This Boy draws on the events, personalities and institutions Alan Johnson observed and came into contact with: racial violence, Oswald Mosley’s 1959 election campaign, Queens Park Rangers Football Club, spivs, the Christie murders, the early pop music scene, Britain’s changing culture.
It is an extraordinary story that evokes the ambience of the North Kensington street photos of Roger Mayne and films such as The Blue Lamp, Sapphire, The L-Shaped Room and The Knack.
Not A Number: The Life of Patrick McGoohan
A talk by Rupert Booth
29 September 2014
When Patrick McGoohan first hit UK screens starring as Danger Man in 1960 audiences were immediately impressed by his fiery persona and on-screen charisma. By the time he took on the role of “Number 6” in cult show The Prisoner his fan-base was global, Hollywood beckoned and many of the actors and directors that he worked with regarded him as enigmatic genius. But who was this man who had worked variously as a chicken farmer and bank clerk before launching a hugely successful acting career simply by chance?
In Not a Number Rupert Booth reveals the true character of a man known for his peculiar off-screen behaviour as much for his acting, directing and writing abilities. Why was he so puritanical, refusing to even kiss a woman for any part he played? Why did he identify so greatly with the individual’s need to assert himself in the face of suppression and mediocrity and how has he become an icon of subversion? A timely exploration of the man whose declaration “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!” continues to resonate with audiences decades after it was first uttered with such conviction in the groundbreaking series, The Prisoner.
Dylan Thomas: Dispelling the Myths
A talk by Jeff Towns, President of the Dylan Thomas Society
9 June 2014
Jeff Towns—one of the leading experts on the life of Dylan Thomas—is launching a brand new and revealing book, Dylan Thomas: The Pubs. Tired of the lazy clichéd description of Dylan as a Bohemian drunken poet, scrounger and womaniser, Jeff Towns and artist Wyn Thomas decided to investigate exactly what role pubs and alcohol had played in his remarkable life. Described by Cerys Matthews as a literary lock-in, the brand new book Dylan Thomas: The Pubs challenges the myths and legends that surround Dylan and drink, and offers a new and revealing insight into his life and work.
The Spy Who Loved
An illustrated talk by Clare Mulley
21 May 2014
In 1952, a woman was murdered in a south London hotel. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising, but that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Christine would become one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated—and most loved—special agents.
Her courage, quick wit and determination won her release from arrest more than once, and saved the lives of many officers, once just hours before their planned execution by the Gestapo. Her actions, and the intelligence she smuggled across borders, made a significant contribution to the Allied war effort and created a legend that has only now been fully brought to light.
In this talk Clare tells the extraordinary story of this charismatic and difficult woman who seemed to know no fear and exercised a mesmeric power over those who knew her.
Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers, and Artists
A talk by David Burke
23 April 2014
The story of a modernist London building with a significant place in the history of Soviet espionage in Britain, where communist spies rubbed shoulders with British artists, sculptors and writers. The Isokon building, also know as Lawn Road Flats, was the haunt of some of the most prominent Soviet agents working against Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of Cambridge spies; the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and Melita Norwood, the longest-serving Soviet spy in British espionage history (and inspiration for Judi Dench's character in Red Joan).
But it wasn't only spies who were attracted to the Lawn Road Flats. The crime writer Agatha Christie wrote her only spy novel N or M? in the Flats, and a number of other artists, architects and writers were also drawn there, among them the Bauhaus exiles Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer; the sculptors and painters Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; the writer and founder of The Good Food Guide Raymond Postgate; and the poet (and Bletchley Park intelligence officer) Charles Brasch. The Isokon building boasted its own restaurant and dining club, where many of the Flats' most famous residents rubbed shoulders with some of the most dangerous communist spies ever to operate in Britain.
The Devil is a Gentleman
A talk by Phil Baker
17 March 2014
Dennis Wheatley virtually invented the popular image of black magic in twentieth-century Britain, and he made it all seem strangely seductive. From the 1930s to the 1970s, his best-selling books presented generations of adolescents with a luxurious vision of the occult that involved pentagrams in country house libraries and virgins lying on top of altars. No wonder many occultists began by reading Wheatley, although they might not always admit it.
Author of a major critical biography, The Devil Is A Gentleman, Phil Baker will discuss Wheatley’s impact on the idea of the occult in popular culture, the esoteric lore in his books, and the perennial question of how much he really knew.
A Rogues’ Gallery: Off the Record Encounters with Figures of Fame, Folly and Fun, 1950-222
A talk by Peter Lewis
10 December 2013
A Rogues' Gallery is a journey through the past half-century, charting the ups and downs of leading writers and actors, thinkers, entertainers, gurus, politicians and public non-conformists. It collects the snapshots gathered during one journalist's long and varied career of the famous and infamous, foolish and funny, when they were off-camera. Here are private views of the tensions that opened cracks in the marriages of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Harold Pinter and Vivien Merchant, Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. What really happened when Laurie Lee drank cider with Rosie? Which film roles made Alec Guinness most satisfied and dissatisfied? Which made a young Judi Dench cry? How the woman Hitler most admired publicly embarrassed him; how the spoons once embarrassed Uri Geller; how theatre critics sometimes get hit; how Jon Snow got out of jail; how comedians from Frankie Howerd to Jacques Tati, P. G. Wodehouse to John Betjeman, are beset with anxiety. These are the sort of discoveries made during an eventful life spent observing human quirks and frailties. They make A Rogues' Gallery a different sort of memoir.
Mr Hogarth
An illustrated talk by cartoonist Martin Rowson
20 November 2013
Hogarth was born in 1697 near the East End cattle market of Smithfield. After apprenticing at a silver workshop, where he mastered the art of engraving, Hogarth opened his own print shop. The artist’s first widespread notice came with the publication of “The South Sea Scheme” (1721), ridiculing the greed and corruption of stock market speculators. “A Harlot’s Progress” (1732) brought Hogarth tremendous success and celebrity, leading to a second morality series, “A Rake’s Progress” (1734).
Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, the artist’s reputation grew and so did his interest in social and moral reform. Hogarth’s work took on a distinctly propagandist tone, directed at the urbanization of London and the city’s problems with crime, prostitution, gambling, and alcoholism.
Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and novelist. His cartoons appear frequently in The Guardian and The Independent.
Victorian Madmen: Revolution and Alienation
A talk by Clive Bloom
16 October 2013
Victorian Madmen tells the stories of a host of figures who came to exemplify a contradictory history of the Victorian age: not one of Dickensian London and smoking factories, but one of little known revolutionaries and radicals.
Clive Bloom mixes extraordinary marginal voices with famous—and infamous—figures, from messiahs like Richard Brothers and “Octavia, Daughter of God”; writers such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; revolutionaries and radicals like Karl Marx, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Oswald Mosley; madmen like Richard Dadd and Jack the Ripper; orientalists and guerrilla fighters such as T. E. Lawrence; worshipers of Pan such as Arthur Machen, Kenneth Grahame and JM Barrie, as well as the Latvian anarchists who killed three policemen in the East End of London.
This is the story of those who were outcasts by temperament and choice; the non-conformists of the Victorian era.
Flappers: Women of a Dangerous Generation
A talk by Judith Mackrell
7 October 2013
Glamorized, mythologized and demonized—the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signal led another cataclysmic world change.
It focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation’s spirit. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail for women around the world.
Joe Boyd and the 1960s, Part Two
At the King and Queen, 1 Foley Street W1
3 June 2013
The Sohemian Society is pleased to welcome back legendary 1960s record producer Joe Boyd to talk about the musicians he worked with in the 1960s, Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and Fairport Convention among others, and his film career as head of music for films in Hollywood.
Born in Boston in 1942, he graduated from Harvard in 1964. After university, he worked as a production and tour manager for George Wein in Europe where he traveled with Muddy Waters, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and others; and at Newport where he supervised Bob Dylan’s electric debut. In 1966, he opened UFO, London’s psychedelic ballroom.
His first record production was four tracks by Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse for Elektra in 1966. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard & Linda Thompson, Maria Muldaur, Toots and the Maytals, REM, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, Cubanismo, Taj Mahal and many others.
As head of music for Warner Brothers Films, he organized the scoring of Deliverance, A Clockwork Orange and McCabe and Mrs Miller and made Jimi Hendrix, a feature-length documentary. He later went into partnership with Don Simpson to develop film projects. He helped set up Lorne Michaels’s “Broadway Pictures” in 1979-1980, then started Hannibal Records, which he ran for 20 years. In 1988, he was Executive Producer of the feature film Scandal.
In 2006, Joe published a memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the Sixties. It received high critical praise and has sold 75,000 copies world wide and has been translated into six languages. He has toured widely in the UK and US with Robyn Hitchcock in the show “Live and Direct from the 1960s” in which he reads and talks and Robyn sings the appropriate songs. He has also produced concerts in celebration of Nick Drake, Kate McGarrigle, Syd Barrett, Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band.
Riot City
A talk by Dr Clive Bloom
29 May 2013
Since 2000, London has seen unprecedented levels of unrest. Its streets have become the battleground for a host of new demands and new ideological standpoints; its occupants, protesters and authority alike, have had to invent new tactics to cope with the pressure of street politics and advances in social media.
Riot City deals in detail with the story behind the capital’s unrest from the perspective of protesters, police and government. Using a range of sources, from security briefings to reportage, Clive Bloom provides an analysis of the modern protest movement, placing it in the context of a long history of rebellion. From the student protests to the August riots, Bloom deftly draws parallels between London ’s shocking events and reveals, more disturbingly, how many lessons can still be learned from our riotous past.
Julian Maclaren-Ross: Soldier of Misfortune
Jon Glover and Callum Coates in two of Maclaren-Ross’s radio plays. In between these there’s be a discussion between Paul Willetts, Alex Maclaren-Ross (Julian’s son), and Nigel Anthony
22 May 2013
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Sohemian Society, which began with a talk by his biographer, Paul Willetts, about the writer and Soho dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), perhaps the most hard-living and hard-drinking of all the area’s famous bohemians, we’ll be hosting this commemorative event.
Best-known as a novelist and short-story writer, whose work has recently been serialized on BBC Radio 4, Maclaren-Ross was also a prolific radio dramatist. At this event you’ll have a rare opportunity to enjoy two of his darkly amusing 1950s radio plays, adapted from his autobiographical stories about his career as a hapless private in the wartime army. The cast includes Callum Coates, formerly of the Globe Theatre and National Theatre, as well as Jon Glover, whose comic gifts so enriched Spitting Image and The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy.
Bookended by the two plays, there’ll be a brief discussion about Maclaren-Ross and the world of 1950s and 1960s London bohemia, chaired by Paul Willetts. The main participants are the author’s only child, Alex; and the veteran actor, Nigel Anthony, who appeared in the original BBC production of one of the featured plays.
Illustration by Marc Glendening
Handsome Brute: The Story of a Ladykiller
A talk by Sean O’Connor
At the King and Queen Pub, Foley Street
25 April 2013
In the summer of 1946, the sadistic murders of the charming but deadly ex-RAF playboy Neville Heath shocked post-war Britain to the core. Heath’s crimes both horrified and fascinated a hungry and exhausted nation in a state of flux. Details of the killings made grisly headlines in the tabloids, spawning a number of sensationalised accounts that later influenced Alfred Hitchcock and the novelist Patrick Hamilton.
Against the backdrop of a society in flux, a culture at a moment of change, how much is Heath’s case symptomatic, or indeed, emblematic of the age he lived in? Handsome Brute is both an examination of the age of austerity, and a real-life thriller as shocking and provocative as American Psycho or The Killer Inside Me, exploring the perspectives of the women in Heath’s life—his wife, his mother, his lovers, and his victims.
I Belonged to the Blank Generation: Blondie, CBGB, and NYC in the 1970s
A talk by Gary Lachman
17 April 2013
As Gary Valentine, Gary Lachman was a founding member of the rock group Blondie. From 1975 to 1977, he was bassist and guitarist with the group and wrote their early hits “X-Offender” and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”. A regular at CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and other Manhattan watering holes, he rubbed elbows with and bummed cigarettes from characters like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, David Bowie, Lou Reed, the Ramones, Talking Heads, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and, of course, Debbie Harry. In 1996-97, he took part in the Blondie re-union and in 2006 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
His book New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation (2002) charts his adventures in this rocked out, poetry laden, art encrusted, and sex and drug filled scene, and portrays a legendary NYC that no longer exists, in all its filth and squalid glory. The East Village and Bowery were the birthplace of what was later called “punk”, but the NY version had more to do with Warhol, Fellini and Rimbaud than safety pins and spit. Gary will talk about his life in the Blank Generation, what was unique about the poetry-enriched music of the time, and what being part of an honest-to-goodness cultural movement was about. Bring your sunglasses.
Bert: the Life and Times of A.L. Lloyd
Dave Arthur in conversation with Paul A. Murphy
27 March 2013
Folk singer and folk music collector, writer, painter, journalist, art critic, sailor on a whaling ship, sheep station roustabout, Marxist, and much more—this is the story of A. L. (Bert) Lloyd's extraordinary life.
A. L. Lloyd played a key part in the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s, but that is only part of his story. Dave Arthur documents how Lloyd became a member of the Communist Party, forceful antifascist, trade unionist and an important part of left-wing culture from the early 1930s to his death in 1982. Following his return from Australia as a 21-year-old, self-educated agricultural labourer, he was at the heart of the most important left-wing movements and highly respected for his knowledge in various fields.
Dave Arthur recounts the life of a creative, passionate and life-loving Marxist, and in so doing provides a social history of a turbulent twentieth century.
Gay Hussar Nights
18 March 2013
An evening devoted to the Gay Hussar, Soho’s famous Hungarian restaurant, which became synonymous with left-wing politicians such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, and Aneurin Bevan.
Photo credit: Carcharoth
Chaps in Skirts
A talk by Neil McKenna
At the King and Queen, Foley Street.
18 February 2013
28th April 1870. Fanny and Stella, the flamboyantly dressed Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton, are causing a stir in the Strand Theatre. All eyes are riveted upon their lascivious oglings of the gentlemen in the stalls. Moments later they are led away by the police. What followed was a scandal that shocked and titillated Victorian England in equal measure.
It turned out that the alluring Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton were no ordinary young women. Far from it. In fact, “Boulton and Park” were young men who liked to dress as women. When the Metropolitan Police launched a secret campaign to bring about their downfall, they were arrested and subjected to a sensational show trial in Westminster Hall.
The Colony Room Club 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho
A talk by Sophie Parkin
3 December 2012
The Colony Room Club was opened by Muriel Belcher in 1948. Witty, charismatic and as a lesbian an outlaw herself, she soon attracted the artists and those of a bohemian bent who peopled Soho at the time. Francis Bacon was a founding member, walking in the day after it opened in 1948. He was “adopted” by Belcher as a “daughter” and allowed free drinks and £10 a week.
Bacon was followed by other artists, among them Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, and over the following decades the club developed its unique atmosphere. Far from grand, it lay at the top of a murky flight of stairs on Soho’s Dean Street, a small and rather unprepossessing room. Nonetheless, the roll-call of members and their cohorts who climbed those stairs reads like a who’s who of the arts in the post war period, from painters, writers, musicians, actors, directors and fashionistas to the more louche members of the aristocracy and even some MPs.
The Edwardian artist & occultist Austin Osman Spare
A talk by Phil Baker
24 October 2012
London has harbored many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956).
A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said “Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man.”
But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions, and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.
The British Seaside
Travis Elborough in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
8 October 2012
The seaside, like football and the railways, is a distinctly English and largely nineteenth-century invention. At the Festival of Britain in 1951, a replica of a seafront represented hope and modernity—once the preserve of the sickly elite, the seaside had become one of the great English egalitarian institutions. But when the advent of cheap flights allowed us to go and see how the rest of the world did it—with better weather and sandier beaches—our boarding houses and bandstands slowly rotted away. As the economy forced a reassessment of our holidaying habits, resorts from Morecambe to Bournemouth enjoyed a renaissance. Capitalising on the uniquely English combination of irony and pride, the English Riviera has been reborn.
In many ways, our national character has been defined by our relationship with the seaside—and in tracing its development, we can see how our ideas about health, wealth and happiness evolved. Our aspirations and snobbery, our attitudes to sex, our keen sense of fair play, our chequered relationship with national pride and our ability to laugh at ourselves have all been played out against a backdrop of stormy skies, pebbly beaches and sticks of rock. The seaside is the place we go to get better, to let our hair down, to downsize, to retire, to take drugs and to hide.
Ranging from Agatha Christie to the Prince Regent via Billy Butlin and Brighton Rock, Travis Elborough explores how a coastline peppered with quasi-Oriental piers makes us quintessentially English. Erudite, charming and surprising, Wish You Were Here is a gloriously unorthodox social history of a nation of islanders.
Joe Boyd and the 1960s, Part One
A talk by Joe Boyd
17 September 2012
Fantastic stories from Joe Boyd about the UFO club on Tottenham Court Road in the 1960s.
Screening of The Small World of Sammy Lee
22 July 2012
An exciting joint venture between the Sohemians and Portobello Pop-Up Cinema (274 Portobello Road, under the Westway). We’ll be showing the classic Soho, New Wave film, The Small World of Sammy Lee.
Sohemian Rhapsody: A Commemoration of the Centenary of the birth of the Writer and Soho Dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross
9 July 2012
Few people have led such a strange life as Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), whose witty and atmospheric work has attracted admirers as varied as Harold Pinter, Evelyn Waugh, Iain Sinclair, Graham Greene and Sarah Waters. Brought up on the French Riviera during the 1920s, his subsequent life encompassed fame and literary success as well as alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness and a psychotic obsession with George Orwell’s glamorous widow.
Callum Coates, founder of the popular Fitzrovia Radio Hour and stalwart of the Globe Theatre under Mark Rylance, stars in a recreation of one of Maclaren-Ross’s short, characteristically stylish 1950s radio plays. This’ll be followed by some rarely seen footage of Maclaren-Ross being interviewed, plus extracts from previously unseen interviews with his friends. There’ll also be short readings from his work, and a discussion between his biographer Paul Willetts and the journalist Virginia Ironside.
Photo: Callum Coates (picture by Andi Sapey)
Laura Del Rivo’s The Furnished Room
Laura Del Rivo in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
18 July 2012
Laura will be talking about her newly reissued 1961 novel, The Furnished Room, which was adapted into the cult Michael Winner movie, West 11.
“The London of Laura Del-Rivo’s first novel, The Furnished Room (1961), is that of the late 1950s when racial tensions became highly visible in Notting Hill and the signs of swinging —and swingeing—London, in sexual behaviour, in popular music, in fashion, and in respectable outrage, began to appear. But life in the capital for young people with jobs as clerks and typists and shop assistants was still repressed, with a repetitive working week shadowed by the recurrent inertia of Sundays and a sporadic pursuit of pleasure in cafés and at parties,” wrote Nicolas Tredell of the London Literary Society.
The History of the Tower of London
A talk by Nigel Jones
5 July 2012
No building has been more intimately involved in the story of Britain than the Tower of London—a mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital. Castle, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, treasure house, armoury, observatory: the Tower has been all these things and more, standing at the epicentre of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years.
Setting this dramatic story firmly in the context of national —and international—events, Nigel Jones's superb history portrays the Tower of London not just as an ancient structure but as a living symbol of the nation.
Robin Ironside: Neo-Romantic and Visionary
A talk by Virginia Ironside, niece of Robin Ironside
16 May 2012
Exquisite and intricate, Ironside’s extraordinary paintings draw upon many sources of inspiration, from Classical Antiquity and Christianity, to the German Rococo, Romantic music and poetry, and his use of hallucinogenic drugs. Completely self-taught, he saw his paintings as belonging to the imaginative tradition of British art, but he was also preoccupied with ‘the hopes and frustrations of living’. Ironside is credited with applying the term “Neo-Romanticism” to British art, and his many publications include a pioneering study of The Pre-Raphaelites. As a designer, he created decorations for the Festival of Britain, as well as sets and costumes for the opera and ballet at Covent Garden.
The Life of Lionel Bart
A talk by David Stafford
16 April 2012
Lionel Bart was a writer and composer of British pop music and musicals, best known for creating the book, music and lyrics for Oliver! He also wrote the famous songs “Living Doll' (Cliff Richard) and “From Russia With Love” (Matt Munroe). He was a millionaire aged thirty in the 1960s, bankrupt in the 1970s and died in 1999.
In this revealing biography, the authors gained exclusive access to Bart's personal archives—his unfinished autobiography, his letters and scrapbooks.
They detail how he signed away the rights to Oliver! to finance his new musical Twang - based on Robin Hood—which flopped badly in the theatre. And they reveal how his heavy drinking led to diabetes and how he died in 1999 aged 69 from liver cancer.
They have interviewed his personal secretaries, friends, family, counselors and many of the performers, musicians and producers who worked with him. Interviewees include Rocky Horror's Richard O'Brien and actors Dudley Sutton and Nigel Planer.
Soho Nights
A talk by Judith R. Walkowitz
28 March 2012
Soho underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its old buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theatres. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be “outside” the nation.
Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth-century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.
The Art of Edward Burra
A talk by Simon Martin, curator at Pallant House
30 January 2012
Edward Burra (1905-76) was an English painter who is best known for his paintings of the seedy underworld of urban life. Yet, as this fascinating new monograph on his work reveals, his interests were much broader, incorporating landscape and still-life paintings, stage designs, book illustration and watercolours. Somewhat neglected by histories of modern art because his singular vision was often at odds with the mainstream art world, his work is now due for a re-appraisal.
Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music
Rob Young in conversation with Paul A. Murphy
c. December 2011
In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music-making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations—song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.
London’s Counterculture
Barry Miles in conversation with Clive Jennings
6 December 2011
London has long been a magnet for aspiring artists and writers, musicians and fashion designers seeking inspiration and success. In London Calling, Barry Miles explores the counter-culture—creative, avant garde, permissive, anarchic—that sprang up in this great city in the decades following the Second World War. Here are the heady post-war days when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazz bars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Bacon and the legendary Colony Room, the 1960s and the Summer of Love, the rise of punk and the early days of the YBAs. The vitality and excitement of this time and years of change—and the sheer creative energy in the throbbing heart of London—leap off the pages of this evocative and original book.
The Gothic in Literature and History
A talk by Clive Bloom
23 November 2011
This is a comprehensive guide to the history of Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day that includes original research. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Gothic became the universal language of architecture, painting and literature, expressing a love not only of ruins, decay and medieval pageantry, but also the drug-induced monsters of the mind.
By explaining the international dimension of Gothicism and dealing in detail with German, French and American authors, Gothic Histories demonstrates the development of the genre in every area of art and includes original research on Gothic theatre, spiritualism, ’ghost seeing’ and spirit photography and the central impact of penny-dreadful writers on the genre, while also including a host of forgotten or ignored authors and their biographies. Gothic Histories is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Gothic and its literary double, the horror genre, leading the reader from their origins in the haunted landscapes of the Romantics through Frankenstein and Dracula to the very different worlds of Hannibal Lecter and Goth culture. Comprehensive and up-to-date, it is a fascinating guide to the Gothic and horror in film, fiction and popular culture.
Animal Magic
Andrew Barrow in conversation with Marc Glendening
22 November 2011
A discussion between Marc Glendening and the writer Andrew Barrow about the freshly re-published edition of The Queue, a short surreal novel by Andrew’s late brother, Jonathan.
The Mysterious Mr Camberton
A talk by Iain Sinclair
14 November 2011
Iain Sinclair will be talking about the pseudonymous author, Roland Camberton, whose best-known novel, Scamp, has recently come back into print.
Life in a London Orphanage
A talk by Paolo Hewitt
9 November 2011
But We All Shine On tells the inspiring story of Paolo Hewitt’s journey to track down a group of friends who shared his childhood in care at Burbank Children’s Home. Stepping into the past, Paolo hears remarkable stories about how his friends coped with life both in and out of care. We meet Des, the boy who reinvented himself, Norman, the runaway child who crossed a continent, David, the boy who couldn’t be heard, and the curious case of Terry — the child who stood in a school field for four days. Paolo hears about his friends’ struggles and triumphs, and discovers many things: about himself, about care, but most of all about the indomitable force of the human spirit - even when faced with the most overwhelming odds. Gripping, insightful and refreshingly honest, But We All Shine On: The Remarkable Orphans Of Burbank Children’s Home is a worthy companion to the Paolo Hewitt’s classic memoir The Looked After Kid: Memoir of a Life in Care as a moving account of the strength and resilience of children.
Moscow Rules: John le Carré’s Smiley’s People
A guided walk by Ben Newbery
6 November 2011
Meet your guide – a slightly furtive and unremarkable-looking man dressed in a black coat and cap, clutching a copy of Smiley’s People and secret instructions graded FLASH – outside the front of The Freemason’s Arms, Downshire Hill, Hampstead Heath, London, NW3 1NT (nearest Underground stations: Belsize Park and Hampstead).
From this starting point, you will be taken to the edge of Hampstead Heath and there briefed on the events leading up to the start of the case. This will include a brief summary of the action in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, followed by background information on Karla – “Smiley’s black grail” – his flawed running man Kirov and developments in Paris and Hamburg.
The party will then join Mostyn at the tin pavillion before investigating the scene of the grisly murder – the killing of an elderly émigré General that brings George Smiley out of retirement. You will then be taken to the place where Smiley discovers the all-important proofs, hidden by the General moments before his death, and from there to the safe house where Lacon and Strickland await. While Strickland is writing up the D-notice for the press, you’ll be appraised of the likely agents of the murder, before heading to South End Green, where Smiley interrogates the taxi driver who drove the general before he died.
The walk will last approximately two hours, concluding in the Magdala Pub on South Hill Park, Hampstead.
Simon Blumenfeld and his 1932 novel, Jew Boy
A talk by Ken Worple, plus readings by Callum Coates
26 October 2011
Alec is a Jewish tailor working in the sweatshops of 1930s Whitechapel. He is part of an immigrant community which fills the streets around Brick Lane with colour and vitality. Yet he is weary of the stifling poverty and his Jewish bosses exploiting his labour. Rejecting the pull of Zionism, Alec instead chooses a unity that crosses racial and religious boundaries, finding his salvation in socialist politics and the arms of a gentile. Jew Boy captures the magic of a multi-layered Cockney culture and the common goals that linked the masses before the war.
Lenin in London
A talk by Helen Rappaport
4 October 2011
Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin's exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change twentieth-century history.
It tells the story of Lenin in the long and difficult years leading up to the Russian Revolution, years that were spent constantly on the move in and around Europe in the company of his loyal and long-suffering wife Nadezhda Krupskaya.
Conspirator strips away the arid politics of Lenin's official life and reveals the real man, as well as describing his many conflicts, personal and political, with those who shared his exile.
Great British Eccentrics
A talk by David McKie
12 April 2011
In Bright Particular Stars, David McKie examines the impact of twenty-six remarkable visionaries on twenty-six unremarkable British locations. From Broadway in the Cotswolds, where the Victorian bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps nurtured dreams of possessing every book in the world, to Kilwinning in Scotland, where in 1839 the Earl of Eglinton mounted a tournament that was Renaissance in its extravagance and disastrous in its execution, he has created a vivid patchwork of arresting narratives that together illuminate some of the most secret—but most extraordinary—byways of our national and local history. Some figures, including Mary Macarthur, who helped the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath win the right to a fair wage in 1910, were good to the point of saintliness; others mixed the admirable with the morally dubious: the composer Peter Warlock rented a cottage in the Kentish village of Eynsford where he composed a gentle song cycle, but set net curtains twitching by his hard drinking and naked motorbike riding.
Video of Sohemian Society co-founder Marc Glendening's admission that he'd stalked Dudley Sutton for the previous twenty years.
London and the Making of the Permissive Society
A talk by Professor Frank Mort
18 January 2011
Did Britain's permissive society start with Swinging London? This exciting new account of 1950s London challenges the sexual myth of the 1960s, arguing that its roots lay further back in the city's dramatic cultures of austerity and affluence that marked the post-war years. A series of spectacular scandals profoundly disturbed London life during the 1950s in ways that had major national consequences. These transgressive events centred on the collision between high and low society that characterized London as a city of social and sexual extremes. Patrician men-about-town, young independent women, go-ahead entrepreneurs, Westminster politicians, queer men and West Indian newcomers were centre-stage in a series of dramatic encounters that opened up a new phase of post-Victorian sexual morality.
Rockin at the 2i’s Coffee Bar
A talk by Andrew Ings
At Peter Parker’s Rock ’n’ Roll Club, 4 Denmark Street
28 October 2010
London in the 1950s attracted numerous artists, musicians and intellectuals. Right in the heart of the city, Soho was like a village community filled with cafes, pubs and clubs. And on the tiny stage of one of these—the 2i’s Coffee Bar—many legendary musicians began their careers.
Andrew Ings will describe how the dark basement of the 2i’s at 59 Old Compton Street became a focal point for British skiffle and emerging rock ’n’ roll. The Vipers were the first skiffle group who really “hit the spot” and took up residency at the 2i’s bar.
Tommy Steele was the undoubted star of its early line up, while Cliff Richard performed at the 2i’s as part of The Drifters. Adam Faith’s band, the Worried Men, became a regular fixture at the 2i’s, where they also appeared on the BBC’s live music series the Six-Five Special in the late 1950s. Artists such as Marty Wilde, Vince Taylor and Terry Dene all made their debuts there and became part of the British history of rock ’n’ roll.
Composer Lionel Bart could also be found in the 2i’s, serving customers, while future producer Mickie Most was employed as a singing waiter. Aspiring musicians came along hoping to be spotted by impresarios and promoters such as Jack Good, Larry Parnes and Don Arden. So the 2i’s became the bridge between musical talent and finding fame and fortune in potential record deals.
Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond Soho’s Billionaire King of Burlesque
A talk by Paul Willetts
19 October 2010
For almost forty years, Paul Raymond was one of Britain’s most scandalous celebrities. Best known as the owner of the Raymond Revuebar, a world famous strip-club frequented by the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and the Krays, he enjoyed equal success as a theatre impresario, property magnate and porn baron.
With his fur coat, gold jewellery, customised Rolls-Royces and taste for busty showgirls, he was often portrayed as the cartoonish personification of nouveau riche vulgarity. Yet he also embodied the entrepreneurial instincts that could transform a Liverpool lad into Britain’s richest man—a man so prosperous he was the victim of a terrifying extortion plot.
Paul Willetts’s atmospheric and amusing book follows Raymond from his strict Catholic upbringing to his death in 2008, by which time his isolation, paranoia, and extreme wealth had earned him the reputation as England’s answer to Howard Hughes.
Alexander Baron and The Lowlife
Iain Sinclair in conversation with Marc Glendening
c. June 2010
Harryboy Boas is a gambling man who loves the dogs. He lives in the quietly respectable streets of Hackney and keeps himself to himself. Until, that is, a new family moves into his building. Step by step, the ordered—if faintly disreputable and financially rackety—life he has led begins to unravel. He is drawn into a murky underworld where violence and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't come up with the money. A brilliant portrayal of a way of life in its last days in the 1960s…
Restless Revolutionaries: A History of Britain’s Fight for a Republic
A talk by Clive Bloom
15 June 2010
From regicides to revolutionaries; from fascists to anarchists; from Tom Paine to Tom Wintringham, this book is a history of noble ideals and crushing failures in which Clive Bloom takes us on a journey through British history, exploring our often rocky relationship with the ruling elite.
Restless Revolutionaries reveals our surprising legacy of terrorism and revolution, reminding us that Britain has witnessed centuries of revolt. This is a history encompassing three bloody civil wars in Ireland, the bombing campaigns by the IRA, two Welsh uprisings, one Lowland Scottish civil war, uprisings in Derbyshire and Kent, five attempts to assassinate the entire cabinet and seize London, and numerous attempts to murder the royal family. This new and revised edition takes the story of modern monarchy back to its origins in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and forward to the reign of Charles III and includes the story of the continuing struggle for democratic rights and republican values from medieval times up to the present struggle for Scottish and Welsh independence.
Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War
A talk by Philip Hoare
28 April 2010
In 1918, the Vigilante newspaper claimed that the German Secret Service held a book containing the names of 47,000 British establishment members who were sexual perverts. It was claimed Britain was losing the war because the Germans were blackmailing these figures and thereby sapping the country’s strength. The Vigilante was exploiting popular belief that Britain had become a decadent state still in thrall to the immoral cult of Oscar Wilde. The extreme right wing politics of the newspaper’s publisher were becoming dangerously popular and in the sensational libel trial that followed many high society members were drawn in. Wilde’s devoted ‘friend’ Robbie Ross and his one-time lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, both became embroiled in the bitter battle over Wilde’s reputation. The author uses original documents and archives to narrate the history of this bizarre scandal, made all the more unusual by having occurred during the final year of World War I. He produces a portrait of wartime society, telling of transvestites in the trenches, of drug clubs in London, and of the roots of British fascism, discerning the seeds of intolerance which would inform the troubled years to come.
The Work and Loves of Somerset Maugham
A talk by Selina Hastings
14 April 2010
For nearly sixty years Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most famous writers in the world, and yet his personal life was largely kept hidden. An enormously successful playwright and the author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-one novels—several of which, Of Human Bondage, Cakes & Ale and The Razor's Edge, are now established classics—Maugham early became an expert at concealment. Predominantly homosexual, Maugham made a disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome, although deeply in love with the charming but dissolute Gerald Haxton. It was partly to escape his wife that Maugham undertook the extensive journeys in the Far East that inspired so many of his memorable short stories. A talented linguist, during both world wars Maugham worked for British Intelligence. In between he moved in literary and theatrical circles in London, New York and Hollywood and entertained lavishly at his luxurious villa in the south of France. Outwardly his life was richly rewarding, but privately he suffered anguish from an unrequited love affair and a shocking final betrayal.
Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham's extensive private correspondence as well as to important family testimony, which sheds a fascinating new light on this complex and extraordinary man.
The Edwardian Practical-Joker Horace de Vere Cole
A talk by Martin Downer
April 2010
At one time pretty much everyone knew the name of Horace de Vere Cole, the greatest practical joker ever. But there has never been a full biography of this fascinating character, because his family have, until now, denied access to his papers. Finally, Downer now has the full cooperation of the family. Cole's comic inventiveness was extraordinary—he once organised a party in which all the guests had the word “bottom” in their surname (i.e. Winterbottom). Much more than a catalogue of his pranks, though, Martin Downer's account of Cole's life offers a fascinating glimpse into a fascinating man.
Alexander Baron: Novelist of London’s Street-life and Politics
A talk by Ken Worpole
16 March 2010
The Guardian described Alexander Baron (1917-1999) as “the greatest British novelist of the last war and among the finest of the postwar period.” Born in Hackney, Baron was amongst those idealists who tried to fight in Spain, who got caught up in political and literary life in London, fought in several major wartime battles, and who, after the war became the author of a series of gripping novels about war and London life in the East End, and in Soho. Three of the most famous are From the City, From the Plough, The Lowlife, and King Dido.
This talk will be given by writer Ken Worpole, who knew Baron and who has written a biographical introduction to a new edition of King Dido, published by Five Leaves Press.
The Grinning Shadow at the Feast: A commemoration of “Saki”
A talk by Professor Tim Connell
16 February 2010
Hector Munro was a journalist better known for his satire and biting wit, written under the pen-name Saki. He foresaw the outbreak of war and wrote about it in 1913 with When William Came. Although over-age, he volunteered for service at the outbreak of war with the Royal Fusiliers (a City regiment) and died on the Somme. But why did he refuse a commission, why did he not join the Intelligence battalion to stay out of the trenches—and why did he choose the pen-name Saki? A century-old literary mystery is about to be solved.
Alexander Baron’s Second World War Writing
A talk by Sean Longden
c. 2010
January 1944, the south coast of England. The Fifth Battalion, Wessex Regiment wait patiently and nervously for the order to embark. There is boredom and fear, comedy and pathos as the men—all drawn from different walks of life—await the order to move. From The City, From The Plough is a vivid and moving account of the fate of these men as they set off for Normandy and advance into France. Military historian Sean Longden will be talking about Alexander Baron and the life of Second World War British infantrymen.
The Life and Art of John Minton
A talk by Francis Spalding
c. 2010
John Minton was an artist, a bohemian and, in his own lifetime, a myth: “the embodiment and symbol”, according to one of his contemporaries, “of a particular decade of London life and London painting”. During the 1940s and early 1950s he became a well-known figure in Soho, and an intimate friend of, among many others, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. This biography by Frances Spalding, the author of the biographies of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Stevie Smith, makes use of hitherto unpublished sources, including letters and articles by Minton himself, as well as countless interviews with the artist's friends and acquaintances. Since the revival of interest in British neo-Romanticism Minton's reputation has been very much in the ascendant and he is steadily emerging as one of the most fascinating artists of his generation.
Quentin Crisp and Philip O’Connor
A talk by Andrew Barrow
9 December 2009
This remarkable double biography celebrates the interlocking lives of two of the greatest eccentrics of the 20th century: the brilliant and bizarre Quentin Crisp and the outlandish Philip O'Connor, whose careers first became entwined in Fitzrovia during the Second World War. This is first authoritative account of the personalities behind their artful facades, told by novelist Andrew Barrow, whose life was profoundly affected by both men.
Anthony Newley: Showbiz Legend
A talk by Paul Goodhead
8 July 2009
Veteran cabaret artiste Paul Goodhead will be treating us to a definitive account of his friend Anthony Newley’s recordings, performances, and acting roles.
The Life of the Prankster Willie Donaldson
A talk by Terence Blacker
17 June 2009
The life of Willie Donaldson ended in June 2005 when he was found dead in the seedy rented flat in Chelsea where he had lived for thirty-five years. His computer, situated in the study he used to call “the literary room”, was still logged on to a website called Lesbian Mud Wrestlers. Willie Donaldson's extraordinary, perverse career of writing, drug-taking, brilliance and underachievement put him in the same holy bracket as Peter Cook, Jeffrey Bernard, Peter Sellers, Hunter S. Thompson and Alan Clark, although his talent for sabotaging his own achievements has meant that his legend has up until now remained a secret to the few.
When Donaldson started writing, his work was compared to Waugh and Nabokov, but his best-known achievement would be The Henry Root Letters, a bestselling practical joke that heralded the new age of celebrity. Yet financial success merely led him deeper into a dark underworld of crack addiction, fraud and sexual perversion. For some Willie Donaldson was a great unsung comic genius. For others, he was irresponsible and diabolical. But his most lasting work of art was undoubtedly his own life—a story that he was never fully capable of telling himself.
The Devil’s Paintbrush
A talk by Jake Arnott
15 June 2009
Paris, 1903. Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the greatest heroes of the British Empire, is facing ruin in a shocking homosexual scandal when he meets the notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley. As they set out into the night on a wild journey through the sinful city, the story of Macdonald's tragedy begins to unfold - with startling revelations both for the General and the aspiring magician.
In a tale that ranges from the battlefields of Sudan to the backstreets of Edinburgh, Jake Arnott brings alive a fascinating, forgotten figure of history, and a world trembling on the brink of a brutal new era. Black magic, Baden-Powell and Islamic revolution are just some of the ingredients in this bold and exhilarating novel, which explores imperialism, sexuality and the very nature of belief with an immediacy that resonates into the present.
Decadent London
A talk by Antony Clayton
20 April 2009
The author recreates the artistic and social milieu of the turbulent period around the end of the nineteenth-century. He provides concise biographical material on its central characters such as Wilde, Symons, Beardsley, Whistler, Dowson, Frank Harris and other less well-known people such as Count Stenbock and John Gray. Clayton surveys the arts produced, the favourite dining places, the public reaction and also the decadent life of London outside this artistic arena at a time, before the cataclysm of the Great War, when Victorian values were crumbling.
Pop Goes The Easel
Harriet Vyner in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
7 April 2009
Harriet Vyner will be talking about the life and times of Robert Fraser and his famous Fraser Gallery at 69 Duke Street, London—a meeting place for many of the key artists, musicians and writers of the 1960s.
Steve Marriott/Robin Friday
A talk by Paolo Hewitt
25 February 2009
Part One
Steve Marriott was one of the music world's most extraordinary individuals, A supremely gifted songwriter, singer and schemer. A vocalist from the same mould as Rod Stewart, Eric Burdon and Steve Winwood, but arguably the greatest white soul singer of them all. Marriott never held back from anything, least of all his music, his vocals always possessed an intensity, clarity and maturity that at the time were unmatched by any other singer.
His band The Small Faces were the first to be banned from Top of The Pops and were deported from Australia at gunpoint. Steve's next group Humble Pie ruled the stadiums of America but the money earned was diverted by mafia associates and he returned to the UK broke and on the run from the Taxman. In later life he struggled with schizophrenia but always continued playing—blistering gigs in front of small audiences in the pubs and clubs around London. Recently reunited with his old Humble Pie sparring partner Peter Frampton, he was on the verge of a comeback when he was tragically killed in a housefire, aged 44-years-old.
Part Two
Robin Friday was an exceptional footballer who should have played for England. He never did. Robin Friday was a brilliant player who could have played in the top flight. He never did.
Why? Because Robin Friday was a man who would not bow down to anyone, who refused to take life seriously and who lived every moment as if it were his last. For anyone lucky enough to have seen him play, Robin Friday was up there with the greats. Take it from one who knows: “There is no doubt in my mind that if someone had taken a chance on him he would have set the top division alight,” says the legendary Stan Bowles. “He could have gone right to the top, but he just went off the rails a bit.” Loved and admired by everyone who saw him, Friday also had a dark side: troubled, strong-minded, reckless, he would end up destroying himself. Tragically, after years of alcohol and drug abuse, he died at the age of 38 without ever having fulfilled his potential.
Windows on the Moon
A talk by Alan Brownjohn
c. February 2009
Set just after the war, the poet Alan Brownjohn’s fourth novel captures with great vividness the lives of Austerity-era Londoners. With no sense of victory, and little let-up in the daily hardships, they are just beginning to feel the beginnings of hope for the future. All, that is, except Pierre-Henri, wartime collaborator in Vichy France, who is lying low and has a bag packed just in case…
The John Minton Experience: A Guided Walk
Guided by Marc Glendening, with contributions by author and journalist Virginia Ironside and actor Tony Austin
February 2009
Photo of the old Royal College of Art building, where John Minton taught (by permission of the Wub/Wikimedia Commons)
A Taste of Honey… and Murray Melvin
A talk by Murray Melvin
26 November 2008
Murray Melvin is best known for having created the role of Geoffrey in the Shelagh Delaney play A Taste of Honey, a role which he recreated opposite Rita Tushingham in the 1961 film of the same name. In 1962 he won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance.
Murray joined Joan Littlewood’s legendary Theatre Workshop company while still a student. He appeared in the company’s classic stagings of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Oh What a Lovely War. He appeared in the very first episode of the cult TV series The Avengers in 1960. His other film appearences have included roles in Alfie, and since 1964, regular appearances in the films of Ken Russell, beginning with Diary of a Nobody and continuing with The Devils.
In 2004 he appeared as Monsieur Reyer, the musical director and conductor of the Opera Populaire, in the film adaption of the musical The Phantom of the Opera. More recently, Melvin has returned to the Theatre Royal as trustee and archivist and it is partly in this role that he is becoming widely known as a learned and popular film historian - he can be seen and heard, for example, on the BFI’s DVD release of the Bill Douglas Trilogy.
Photo credit: Stratfordeast
The Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross
A talk by Paul Willetts
c. September 2008
Maclaren-Ross’s biographer Paul Willetts will be talking about Maclaren-Ross’s newly published Selected Letters. Extracts from these will be read by Callum Coates and Tony Austin.
Billy Hill, Godfather of London
A talk by Wensley Clarkson
c. August 2008
Billy Hill—Britain's first celebrity gangster—elevated himself to the very top of the pantheon of organised crime. By the 1950s, he had control of the city's gambling rackets and had masterminded a heist that set the template for the Great Train Robbery. The infamous Mad Frankie Fraser was his henchman and upon his retirement to homes in Spain and Tangiers, he acted as mentor to two up-and-coming youngsters, the Kray twins. Gangland chronicler Clarkson expertly documents each chapter of Hill's outrageous, violent, crime-filled life
The Suarez Séance
Readings by Richard Strange and Cathi Unsworth, accompanied James Johnston and Terry Edwards
At the Horse Hospital
16 July 2008
Revisiting the dark world of Derek Raymond with the original I Was Dora Suarez soundtrack performed live by James Johnston, Terry Edwards and Richard Strange. To celebrate the re-release of the classic 1993 album Dora Suarez (by Derek Raymond, James Johnston and Terry Edwards) and the reprint of the original novel I Was Dora Suarez, a night of music, film and conversation saluting the godfather of British Noir.
In 1993, the author Derek Raymond and the multi-instrumentalists James Johnston and Terry Edwards of Gallon Drunk came together to record an extraordinary artefact. The text of Raymond's landmark novel I Was Dora Suarez was set to an original score by Johnston and Edwards, that lifted the worlds of an unnamed Detective Sergeant, a psychopathic killer and his victim, the beautiful Dora Suarez, off the page and into a sonic séance. Using the sounds of the streets as their guide, these two highly talented and original musicians wove a nightmarish soundtrack to the unforgettable spoken word of Raymond, immortalising a book that would change the very course of British crime fiction. The trio performed this work once, at the National Film Theatre in a sell-out concert in the summer of 1993, the first time that a music event had ever taken place at this venue.
Derek Raymond died in 1994, leaving a body of work that would inspire a new generation of crime writers and steadily gain a following of new fans as Serpent's Tail began republishing his canon in 2006. Now, James and Terry revisit the scene of the crime, conjuring Dora back from the darkness once more, with guest performer Richard Strange in the role of Derek Raymond, live on the Horse Hospital stage. To further channel the spirit of Raymond, the performance will be complimented by a rare screening of the 1993 documentary Passages in Black: Three Days With Derek Raymond directed by Agnes Bert, and conversation with Raymond's friend and literary executor John Williams and Geoff Cox, the man who came up with the genius idea of putting the Suarez project together in the first place. This is a night not to be missed for all fans of Derek Raymond, Gallon Drunk and noir literature in general.
Danger and Madness in Earl’s Court: the World of Patrick Hamilton
A guided walk, starting at Earls Court tube station
12 July 2008
This journey in deepest Hangover Square territory will take approximately two hours and conclude at the King’s Head, 17 Hogarth Place (off Earls Court Road).
Copies of Nigel Jones’s recently republished biography of Patrick Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly, and Hamilton’s novel, Craven House (both published by Black Spring Press), will be available on the day.
Illustration by Ronald Glendening
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer
A talk by Allan Sillitoe
c. March 2008
From The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner to his more recent A Man of His Time, Alan Sillitoe remains one of England's greatest living authors. A Start in Life is Sillitoe’s ninth novel and follows the fortunes of Michael Cullen, who describes himself as “a bastard” at the start of the novel and soon confirms another meaning of the term when he leaves Nottingham and his pregnant girlfriend behind to flee to London, where he becomes involved in a smuggling ring. Sillitoe has adopted the picaresque form for this novel, yet it is full of his trademark humour.
Spiv City: London Fiction of the Post-War Forties
c. November 2007
Dramatised readings from James Curtis’s The Gilt Kid and Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City, performed by Callum Coates, Tony Austin, and Alix Dunmore. Compèred by Paul Willetts.
Photo credit: Willem van der Poll
The Bright Young People
A talk by D.J. Taylor
c. November 2007
The Bright Young People were one of the most extraordinary youth cults in British history. A pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites, they romped through the 1920s gossip columns. Evelyn Waugh dramatised their antics in Vile Bodies and many of them, such as Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford,Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, later became household names. Their dealings with the media foreshadowed our modern celebrity culture and even today,we can detect their influence in our cultural life.
But the quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the parties and practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow of war, whose relationships - with their parents and with each other - were prone to fracture. For many, their progress through the “serious” Thirties, when the age of parties was over and another war hung over the horizon, led only to drink, drugs and disappointment, and in the case of Elizabeth Ponsonby—whose story forms a central strand of this book—to a family torn apart by tragedy.
Patrick Hamilton’s Sinister Brighton
A guided walk, starting at the old West Pier
16 September 2007
16 September 2007
The walk will be led by Nigel Jones (author of the Hamilton biography, Through a Glass Darkly) and Marc Glendening, co-founder of the Sohemian Society. Punctuating the afternoon, Globe Theatre actor Callum Coates will be reading from The West Pier.
Illustration by Ronald Glendening
The Life and Work of Patrick Hamilton
A talk by Nigel Jones, plus readings by Callum Coates and Tony Austin
20 June 2007
Born in Sussex in 1904, he moved shortly afterwards with his parents to Hove, where he passed his formative years. His first novel, Craven House, was published in 1925 and within a few years he had established a wide readership for himself. Two plays, Rope (on which Hitchcock based his film) and Gaslight, brought him commercial success and his high point as a novelist was reached with The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square. His reputation seemed assured, but it was overshadowed by personal setbacks and an increasing preoccupation with drink. Yet in spite of these pressures he was able to produce some of his best work, in which an underlying sense of loss and isolation is felt beneath his comic creations.
Bob Fabian and the Hunt for the Killers of Alec de Antiquis
A talk by Paul Willetts, plus readings by Callum Coates and Tony Austin
13 June 2007
North Soho 999 is a surprisingly topical non-fiction account of the murder that came to symbolise the crimewave threatening to overwhelm post-war London. Set in bomb-scarred London in 1947, it is the untold story of a Soho robbery and shooting carried out by a seventeen year-old and his two young accomplices. The crime sparked worldwide press coverage and was associated with a single, potent image; a photograph of the dying man stretched across the pavement. Much of the press reaction at the time focused on the breakdown of law and order, rising youth crime, the spread of illegal firearms and the deterrent value of capital punishment—concerns that are frequently echoed today.
Paul Willetts tells the story of the hunt for the killers, which brought together the pioneering forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury; the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint; the crusading journalist, Duncan Webb; and the Scotland Yard detective, Bob Fabian whose dazzling detective work led to the creation of Fabian of the Yard, the world's first hit television cop show. It also inspired the Dirk Bogarde movie, The Blue Lamp, which became a huge box office success.
The Murderous Mr Gorse
A talk by Nigel Jones, plus readings by Callum Coates
c. April 2007
Ernest Ralph Gorse’s heartlessness and lack of scruple are matched only by the inventiveness and panache with which he swindles his victims. With great deftness and precision Patrick Hamilton exposes how his dupes’ own naiveté, snobbery or greed make them perfect targets. These three novels are shot through with the brooding menace and sense of bleak inevitability so characteristic of the author. There is also vivid satire and caustic humour.
Hamilton’s biographer, Nigel Jones, will be talking about the genesis of these novels and their creator’s drink-sodden latter years.
Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground
A talk by Marek Kohn
c. 2007
Like his book, Dope Girls, Marek Kohn’s talk will focus on the death of Billie Carleton—a West End musical actress—in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, there swirled a raffish group of seedy and entitled hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated, and so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.
The Life and Work of George Orwell
A talk by DJ Taylor
c. 2007
Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective “Orwellian” is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, DJ Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth-century. Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.
Gerald Kersh Evening
A talk by Paul Duncan
c. 2007
Paul Duncan—who is working on a biography of Gerald Kersh—will be talking about the colourful life and work of this maverick writer. The focus of the evening will be his best-known novel, Night and the City, which has twice been adapted into movies. It’s a seminal low-life novel, which presents a vivid glimpse of a lost London.
Off the Road: My Life with Jack Kerouac
Carolyn Cassidy in conversation with Robert Hastings
c. 2007
Written by the woman who loved them all—as wife of Neal Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg—Carolyn Cassady’s riveting and intimate memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive successes of Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's Howl, the flowering of the Beat movement, and the social revolution of the 1960s. Artist, writer, and designer Carolyn Cassady reveals a side of Neal Cassady rarely seen—that of husband and father, a man who craved respectability, yet could not resist the thrills of a wilder, and ultimately more destructive lifestyle.
Israel Zangwill: the Jewish Charles Dickens
A talk by Carol Seigal
29 November 2006
Born in London in 1864, Israel Zangwill can certainly be said to have left his mark in the world. Fiction writer, dramatist, essayist and political activist, he went to school in London and had a degree in French, English as well as in Mental and Moral Science. He was the father of modern British-Jewish literature. From his first book, Motza Kleis (Matzoh Balls), written together with a fellow student, he analyzed, even if humorously, life in the poorest Jewish quarters of London and his heavy use of Yiddish created controversy. As a young man he taught in his school, the Jew’s Free school, but left in 1888 due to opposition against corporal punishment. He then worked as journalist for the Jewish Standard writing a humour column.
His first major novel, Children of the Ghetto, came in 1892, commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America. Depicting an ironic look on Jewish life, it had an overwhelmingly positive response even though criticized for exposing his people to a non-Jewish audience. Prior to this he had written two short fiction volumes on non-Jewish themes: The Bachelor’s Club and The Old Maids’ Club, both very successful.
Also from this period came the contribution of mystery fiction with The Big Bow Mystery, the first locked room murder novel. His next works, the novella Merely Mary Ann (later adapted by Zangwill into a play), Ghetto Tragedies, The King of Schnorres and Dreamers of the Ghetto, were also extremely popular.
At the turn of the century he married Edith Ayrton (1903), with whom he was to have three children, and became extremely involved in politics. He was a so-called spokesman for Anglo Jewry and fought many battles for the creation of a Jewish state as well as for women’s suffrage and pacifism. He did not stop writing: plays, a collection of poems and the novel Ghetto Tragedies.
Following a speech in 1923 where all his frustration at the slowness of the Zionist movement made him declare the latter politically dead, his career started to fall as well as his health and he died in 1926 following a nervous breakdown.
Carol Seigel is a curator at the Hampstead Museum and an authority on the life and work of Israel Zangwill.
The Unveiling of Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Gravestone
A talk by Andrew Brighton
29 July 2006
Virginia Ironside, who raised the money for the gravestone and campaigned for the right to put it up, and Maclaren-Ross’s biographer, Paul Willetts, will both say a few words. At 5pm there will be a gathering in the Wheatsheaf to raise a glass to the great man.
Photo: Alex Maclaren-Ross and Virginia Ironside next to the newly installed memorial on the hitherto unmarked grave of Alex's father, Julian Maclaren-Ross. In a nice literary coincidence, the inscription on the stone ended up being carved by Tom Waugh, great grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was an admirer of Julian's early work.
Mother of Oscar: the Life of Francesca Wilde
A talk by Joy Melville
11 May 2006
Lady Wilde was the linchpin of the Wilde family. Courageous and strong-minded, as a young woman she defied her Protestant family’s pro-Union politics and, during the terrible days of the Great Famine, writing under the name of Speranza, she electrified Ireland with her passionate tirades in verse and prose against the English.
When she married the brilliant eye and ear surgeon Dr William Wilde, later knighted by Queen Victoria, she transferred her loyalty to him and her children. At one point she bravely defended her husband in court in a libel case that was the sensation of Dublin and foreshadowed Oscar’s own trial some thirty years later.
Lady Wilde adored both her sons and in turn they adored her. Oscar was to compare her intellectually with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with the revolutionary Madame Roland. Like Madame Roland, Lady Wilde, whose ’talk was like fireworks—brilliant, whimsical and flashy’, held salons to which the literary world came and over which she presided with panache.
Although Willie, her elder son, had been eclipsed by Oscar, her hopes for him were as high as for Oscar and indeed in 1879, when she joined her sons in London, Willie was thought to have a brilliant journalistic career ahead of him.
In Mother of Oscar the complex relationship between Willie, Oscar and their mother is fully explained for the first time. Since her sons revered her as they did, Lady Wilde’s influence over them was strong and they inherited both strengths and weaknesses from her. Witty, often outrageous, with very strong feminist views, she was a most memorable woman.
Olaudah Equiano and the St. Giles Blackbirds: Black London in the
Eighteenth Century
A talk by Professor Brycchan Carey
January 2006
Fundraiser for Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Headstone
Virginia Ironside in conversation with Alex Maclaren-Ross and Paul Willetts, plus readings by Callum Coates
2005
“The writer Julian MacLaren Ross, who is enjoying a well-deserved resurrection in literary circles, lies in an unmarked grave in Mill Hill Cemetery. It is a bleak spot and it is high time he had a headstone,” writes Virginia Ironside. All proceeds from this fundraiser will go towards the cost of paying for a gravestone to be installed on Maclaren-Ross’s unmarked grave at the Paddington Cemetery in Mill Hill, London.
Bitten By The Tarantula
A talk by Paul Willetts, plus readings by Callum Coates
c. 2005
Julian Maclaren-Ross’s biographer Paul Willetts will be talking about the newly published collection of his work. The book juxtaposes short fiction, journalism, and literary essays with the title novella, which depicts pre-war expat’ life on the French Riviera.
The Memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross
A talk by Paul Willetts, plus readings by Callum Coates
c. 2005
Julian Maclaren-Ross was one of the most colourful inhabitants and chroniclers of the Soho and Fitzrovia between the 1940s and early 1960s. He knew and wrote about its most memorable characters including Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, JM Tambimuttu, Nina Hamnett and Woodrow Wyatt. He was something of a dandy and a gifted raconteur, and his life, often chaotic, and related unsentimentally by him in these memoirs, veered between the fringes of the literary establishment and occasional homelessness.
The Empress of Pleasure: The Life and Adventures of Teresa Cornelys
A talk by Judith Summers
c. 2005
Outrageous, ingenious and indomitable, Teresa Cornleys was a unique figure in 18th century Europe whose private life and professional dealings scandalised society.
A Venetian opera singer and adventuress, she arrived in England in 1759, leaving a trail of debts and lovers across Europe. She was thirty-six years old, destitute and the mother of Casanova's child. Within months, she had acquired one of the finest mansions in London's West End—Carlisle House, Soho Square—where she successfully launched the capital's first night-club. For two decades, her extravagant concerts, balls and masquerades were frequented by royalty, aristocrats and politicians. She defied conventional morality, the law, the limitations of her sex, and even old age.
A Magical Beast on the Streets
A talk by Dr Christina Oakley-Harrington
c. 2005
The founder of Treadwell's bookshop and former academic Dr Christina Oakley-Harrington will focus on the London life of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the English occultist, philosopher, and founder of the Thelema cult.
Janey and Me: Growing Up With My Mother
A talk by Virginia Ironside
c. 2005
Is it every woman’s fate to turn into her mother? This is renowned writer and journalist Virginia Ironside’s poignant and blackly funny memoir of life with fashion professor and media icon Janey Ironside, for whom, even years after her death, Virginia continues to be mistaken.
Stylish, beautiful and self-loathing, Janey Ironside was to lead a cultural revolution. In 1956 she became Professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art, then an extraordinary appointment for a young mother. Discovering and promoting designers like Ossie Clark and Bill Gibb, she changed the way people dressed around the world and herself became a fashion icon. Yet the qualities that made her great—wit, talent and drive—did not bring happiness to either her or her family.
A Tribute to the Writer Julian Maclaren-Ross
Jonathan Meades, D.J. Taylor, Virginia Ironside, and Paul Willetts in conversation
In the Studio Theatre at the Soho Theatre
July 2005
Nobs, Snobs, and Toms
A talk by John Branston
21 April 2005
John Branston—friend of the late Michael Nelson, the notorious postwar black-marketeer and Soho strip-joint owner—relates the choicest escapades from Mickey’s kiss-and-tell “Captain Blossom” memoirs. Also recollections of Soho prostitution and drinking dens and scandalous first hand literary anecdotes recalling the Horizon years and pre-war Soho haunts of the 1920s.
A map of interwar Soho clubland, known as “the Black Mile”, will be distributed as a souvenir.
John Gawsworth: the King of Redonda
A talk by Roger Dobson
24 March 2005
John Gawsworth (1912-70) is one of Soho’s great unsung literary figures. Poet, boozer and bohemian, he championed many neglected and cult authors. Gawsworth was King Juan of the legendary realm of Redonda, a romantic fantasy kingdom that endures to this day. Gawsworth’s associates, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, were “peers of the realm”.
Joan Wyndham: Born in Bohemia
A talk by Joan Wyndham
24 February 2005
The writer Joan Wyndham chronicles the different stages of bohemianism in Britain from the unique perspective of her own extraordinary life.
She was born into the movement. The family home, Clouds House in Wiltshire, provided a base for The Souls, an avant-garde group dedicated to the arts. Her father, Dick Wyndham, was an artist and patron of Wyndham Lewis who labelled him “a champagne Bohemian”.
In the period running up to the Second World War Joan was an art student in Chelsea and during her service with the WAAF met the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross who introduced her to the joys of Soho and its characters.
In the post-war period she gravitated back to the Chelsea arts scene, hung out with the beatniks in the 1950s and later experienced the hippie scene.
Wyndham Lewis: Vorticist
A talk by Richard Humphreys
9 December 2004
Richard Humphreys — curator at Tate Britain — will talk about and show slides featuring the work of the high priest of the Vorticist movement. Wyndham Lewis, both an artist and a writer, was the driving force of modernism in Britain in the early twentieth-century. Richard Humphreys examines the legacy of this politically and culturally controversial figure.
The Novelist Sax Rohmer
A talk by Antony Clayton
7 October 2004
Forever associated with his creation of evil genius Dr Fu Manchu, a Chinese super-criminal scheming to destroy Western civilisation, Sax Rohmer (1883-1959) was the king of pulp exotica. At the height of his fame Rohmer was one of the most popular writers on the planet, but now he is largely remembered for outrageous attitudes and lurid Chinaphobia. Antony Clayton approaches Rohmer with something more than routine disapproval, and instead brings out the complexity and historical significance of his work.
Francis Bacon: Sex, Violence and Dirt
A talk by Andrew Brighton
10 June 2004
When Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucufixion was exhibited in 1945 Francis Bacon (1909-1992) instantly became the most controversial painter in the country. By the end of his life his status as one of the giants of modern art was established, as was his reputation for hard drinking and heavy gambling. Tate Gallery curator Andrew Brighton casts fresh light on Bacon's formation as an artist in gay and aristocratic bohemian London circles. He locates Bacon at the core of contesting ideas and values, while firmly grounding his reading of Bacon's work in an understanding of his working methods and technique. Penetrating the seeming horror of Bacon's painting this book reveals the ideas, the beliefs and the life that formed one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.
Tom Driberg: Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw
A talk by Francis Wheen
10 June 2004
Francis Wheen will be talking about his brilliantly comic biography of one of the twentieth-century’s great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend of the Kray twins.
An Audience with George Melly
At the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead
Thursday 13th May 2004
A unique opportunity to hear George Melly talk about his memories of Soho, its jazz scene, its drinking clubs, its characters, and its sleazy side. His conversation with the biographer Paul Willetts will be followed by a screening of John Maybury’s acclaimed Francis Bacon biopic, Love Is The Devil.
Photo credit: P.G. Champion
Montague Summers: Writer, Clergyman, Occultist
A talk by Timothy d’Arch Smith
27 May 2004
Summers (1880-1948 first achieved fame as an expert on the occult in 1926 when he published his History of Demonology and Witchcraft. This was followed by other studies of witches, vampires and werewolves. As an editor he also introduced to the public a reprint of The Discovery of Witches by the infamous Matthew Hopkins and the first English translation of the classic fifteenth century treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum. In later life he also wrote influential studies of the Gothic novel, another lifelong enthusiasm.
Soho: a History of London's Most Colourful Neighbourhood
A talk by Judith Summers
18 March 2004
This account of the area's history uses the unique memories of its current inhabitants, emphasizes its social and cultural diversity and examines its notoriety. It covers the 17th century, when Soho was a fashionable neighbourhood, and the 18th century during which it became a slum district. Its role as a centre of immigrant life is also investigated.
The Life and Writing of Julian Maclaren-Ross
A talk by Paul Willetts
4 December 2003
First published less than six months ago, Paul Willetts's much-praised biography of the Soho writer and dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) has revived interest in his ground-breaking work and flamboyant personality. Synonymous though he is with Soho, his uniquely strange life included spells in the army and on the French Riviera. So chaotic was his existence that he makes Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski appear models of stability and self-restraint. During fifty-two hectic years Maclaren-Ross endured alchoholism, drug-induced psychosis, poverty, homelessness, imprisonment, near insanity and a Scotland Yard man-hunt. At one stage he even stalked and fantasised about murdering George Orwell's glamorous widow.